Communications privacy has become increasingly important to the protection of business interests in a competitive global economy. This is made difficult by the widespread use of wireless communications and the like. Such wireless communications are often interceptible and exploitable beyond any existing communications control mechanisms. Therefore, it is prudent for businesses and others to seek and institute new, cost-effective electronic protective measures that allow the efficiency of the host processes to be maintained.
One relatively straightforward communications control mechanism is the use of encryption technology to protect vital, competitively valuable data and information from successful interception and subsequent exploitation. One significant problem faced by communications engineers and the like in attempting to provide such protection, however, is the relatively high speed that such encryption technology requires. This problem is compounded by the labor overhead required to institute and maintain the proper operation of such communications control mechanisms.
Expanding upon this problem, short-range wireless equipment control links and the like are becoming increasingly prevalent. Such control links, and the associated applications, require high-speed two-way communications with low latency. Many of these control links utilize star-like communications flows, wherein a central module broadcasts messages to outlying modules and the outlying modules respond to the central module in a pre-ordered fashion. These messages often contain vital, competitively valuable data and information related to products, services, installations, and the like. Typically, this sort of problem has been approached using cryptographic architectures wherein there is a separate encryption unit for outbound messages and a separate encryption unit for inbound messages.
What is needed are instrumentation privacy methods and apparatuses that protect these control links and the data and information transmitted on them from interception and subsequent exploitation. What is also needed are instrumentation privacy methods and apparatuses that are relatively simple to install, set up, and maintain, requiring only minimal labor overhead and not significantly impacting communications latency. Accordingly, what is needed are instrumentation privacy methods and apparatuses that utilize a single outbound/inbound cryptographic generator, such as a shrinking generator or the like designed using six-sigma tools in order to ensure, within a predetermined probability, that the non-fixed encryption time does not cause operational problems.